Class Reductionism and White Identity Politics in a Post-Trump America
Our end of year sale has begun! Save between 10% and 30%. Click here for details.
Socialist icon Eugene Debs once said, “The class struggle is colorless.” I would counter that the real class struggle must be color-full.
The American election has been called (though it is still not over). It has been an uncomfortably close race, especially considering that pollsters predicted (and progressives hoped for) a Biden win by a healthy margin. The races in Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were neck and neck. And Biden’s wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona were too close for comfort. Florida and North Carolina were also very close, though FL went to Trump and NC probably will too. And the hoped-for blue wave in Congress didn’t materialize either.
The question that Democrats are asking themselves—or at least the question they should be asking themselves—is this: “Why was the election this close?” After four years of buffoonery, after all the COVID deaths, after the continued decline of the economy—the real economy, not Wall Street—how did almost half of Americans (and with record turnout!) still vote for Trump? How did six and half million more people vote for Trump this time than in 2016?
The answer, the unavoidable answer, is racism—specifically the racism of White¹ America.
Race has been the single most important factor in predicting American elections for the past two generations. Since the Democrats became the party of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the majority of White Americans have consistently voted for the Republican Party. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively, and since then, no Democratic candidate for U.S. President has ever won a majority of White votes. (And this phenomenon is not limited to the Southern states.) Not even Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were able to win over the majority of White voters.
In 2016, 54% of Whites voted for Donald Trump, compared to 39% for Hillary Clinton. (Whites represented 74% of the electorate in 2016.) This time around, Trump got 57% of Whites. In light of this, it is more important than ever that American radicals and progressives alike continue to center racial analyses. And that’s why it is all the more disturbing to hear calls at this time from some Leftists² to look the other way.
The Reality of Social Constructions
“Racism is the belief that races exist. … If you insist that race is real … [you ] are racist.”
Who would you guess made that statement?
(a) a White, southern oil rigger who wears a MAGA hat and drives a truck with a Confederate flag
(b) a White, suburban, college-educated, swing-voting lawyer with POC friends
(c) a Black, Marxist professor of political science endorsed by the largest chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America
The answer is (c). The Black, Marxist professor emeritus of political science in question is Adolph Reed.³ He is one of the more prominent voices carrying this message, but he is not alone. Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, is another. Even some authors who contribute to this site have advanced Reed’s views. But the point is that the statement above could very well have been made by either (a) or (b).
According to Reed, when we insist that race is “real”, we are “essentializing”, meaning we are treating race as a biological category. Of course, we know that there is no such thing as race in a biological sense. But race is real in a sociological sense. Yes, race is a social construction, as are all social categories, even ones that have some basis in biology. But that doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have real consequences for people’s lives and how power is distributed in a society.
Class is a social construction too. It has no biological basis. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real, because it too has real consequences. It is no more “essentialist” to acknowledge that race is a reality than it is to acknowledge that any other category, like class or gender, are real.
Race First or Class First?
We are living in a time when tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of White Americans are waking up to the fact that they are White—that is, that they are beneficiaries of four centuries of White supremacy.⁴ This is happening after at least two generations of White Americans being raised to believe that not being racist meant being (or pretending to be) “color-blind” and that not mentioning or acknowledging race would somehow make racism disappear. That myth (which largely existed in the minds of White people) was shattered by the election of Donald Trump and the parade of deplorables that followed. White liberal America woke up to the fact that we had overt racists—some of them honest-to-god Nazis—living in our midst (and a lot of them are police officers!).
And just now, when White America is starting to wake up to its privilege, to its complicity, and yes, to its guilt and shame (which I think is healthy), we hear other voices calling us away from a race-centered analysis. Where are these voices coming from? The Right, to be sure. (“Black Lives Matter is racist!") The ignorant and complacent, of course. (“Can’t we talk about something other than race?”) But also from the Left, from some of our comrades. Why? In order to advance a class-centered analysis:
“At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. ‘These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,’ Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006 …
“Obama allowed that ‘blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends’—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President”
But in reality, rather than people of color “benefitting disproportionately” from race-neutral socialist reforms, what they often get instead is a kind of “trickle down” economic justice. “Rising tide raises all ships” policies tend to reinforce disparities among different groups. That’s because any race-neutral redistribution leaves the racial hierarchy intact.
It is true that racism (especially in America) is a product of capitalism. But it does not follow that we should, or even can, sidestep race to class in an effort to deconstruct both. In fact, there’s a good reason to believe that these interrelated phenomena have to be deconstructed in the reverse order—in a similar way that it’s easier to deconstruct a brick wall from the top down. The weight of the blocks at the top of the wall presses down on those at the bottom, making them harder to remove. Likewise, the “weight” of White supremacy helps to maintain the stability of the capitalist order. That’s why, as Ronald Cox explains:
“The key to building multiracial working class unity is to acknowledge these divisions and to fight for the interests of oppressed groups as part of the struggle to build a unified working class movement. The fight for the interests of the most oppressed members of the working class, whose identity is often defined by the precarity of their existence under U.S. and global capitalism, is essential in building a large-scale, multiracial working class movement.”
— Ronald Cox, “A Left Critique of Class Reductionism”
White Fragility and Working Class Complicity
Often the class-first argument is made in conjunction with a claim that focusing on race is “divisive” or alienates White people. There is an intuitive appeal to this argument—especially to White people—for whom race is a very uncomfortable topic,⁵ but it is precisely because of the discomfort it creates that we must fight to hold it front and center. As Robin DiAngelo explains:
“we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. … These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”
— Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility
Setting aside White fragility, there is a compelling logic to the argument that we should focus on what we have in common, rather than what divides us, but doing so misses the point that what makes us different is just as important. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in his essay, “The First White President”, when some on the Left jump past racism in order to center class struggle, they gloss over how the White working class has been not only the beneficiary of racism, but one of its main enforcers:
“The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; … Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts [like the election of Trump] were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President”
Labor can be a force for breaking down racial divisions, but it can also be a tool of oppression. A good example of this comes from the region of the country where I live, which is in the highly industrialized Rust Belt. Not only did decades of labor organizing fail to break down racist divides here (today it’s the most segregated metro area in the country), but unions were actually used to reinforce those divides. The steel mills, for example, were highly segregated workplaces, precisely because the unions themselves were racist. People of color were initially excluded from the unions, and even after their inclusion, the dirtier and more dangerous (and less compensated) jobs were overwhelmingly filled by people of color. Segregation of trade unions remains a problem today.*
White Supremacy Thrives in the Dark
The saying goes: “When we don’t see race, then we can’t see racism.” When people of color are not seen as people of color and White people are not seen as White⁶, then the experience of the White majority becomes normative and the experience of people of color under White supremacy is erased. When that happens, deviations from that (White) norm are individualized and stigmatized. This is how we get the myths of the “welfare queen”, the “criminal thug” and other coded language.
While coming from a different ideological source, the call to center class before race has the same effect as the declaration “All Lives Matter” does as a response to “Black Lives Matter”, the same effect as all supposedly race-neutral analyses: It obscures the impact of White supremacy, thereby ensuring its perpetuation. This is how White supremacy reproduces itself—by making itself invisible.
It’s much the same with gender. When women’s and non-binary people’s experiences are not explicitly acknowledged, then we default to a supposedly universal “human” experience, which is in fact the experience of men. The experience of men becomes the default for human experience, and women’s experience of living in a patriarchal culture either becomes pathologized or disappears from view altogether.
Something similar can happen to trans people. We correctly observe that gender is a social construction, but if we try to eliminate the category of gender too hastily, then the experience of transgender people living in a cis-normative society is erased. Like gender, race is a social construction, but simply pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. Instead, it continues to dominate human relations, but now in the background, out of view, and insulated from criticism.
Good and Bad Identity Politics
Identity politics is another frame in which this debate commonly occurs. What is referred to as “identity politics” generally means the politics of women, of LGBT people, of people of color—in short the politics of everyone except White cis-het men. What is the politics of White cis-het men called? It’s just called “politics”.
The problem with the notion of identity politics isn’t that it focuses on the experiences of one group of people—it’s about time that the experience of someone other than White cis-het men was heard! The problem is the underlying notion that there ever was such a thing as a politics without identity, a politics without a frame of reference, without a particular perspective informed by one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. All politics is identity politics. If it’s not the identity politics of people of color, then it’s the identity politics of White people.
But not all identity politics is not equal. There is a good identity politics and a bad identity politics. The good form is intersectional—it includes race, gender, class, etc. The bad form of identity politics is partial—it excludes one or more of these categories, like race, gender, or class. As Bernie Sanders’ press secretary Briahna Gray explains, the Left’s and Right’s respective critiques of identity politics are really critiques of two different things: “the left’s critique of identity politics is not really a critique of identity politics at all, but of the cynical weaponization of identity for political ends.”
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign offers a prime example.⁷ HRC’s candidacy held out the promise of the first woman President. As a result, her critics were often indiscriminately accused of misogyny. This kind of partial identity politics tends to produce symbolic or performative action which just reinforces the capitalist order. That’s what tokenism is at its core. Nobody is just one thing. HRC wasn’t just a woman; she was a White woman, and a rich elite White woman at that. So while some criticisms of her candidacy were in fact rooted in misogyny, others were legitimate race and class critiques.
Yes, it’s true that poor White people have much more in common with poor Black people than they do with rich White people. But that doesn't mean that there isn’t a uniquely Black experience of poverty. The point isn’t that class is unimportant. The point is that you can’t look at class in isolation from race, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and all the rest. None of these categories is reducible to the other.
Superficial intersectionality without anti-capitalism is just neoliberal identity politics. And narrow anticapitalism without intersectionality is class reductionism. A class analysis that subordinates race to class leaves White supremacy intact, just as a racial analysis that ignores class leaves capitalism intact. As Tyler Zimmer has written:
“We must oppose every attempt by self-avowed leftists to brand anti-racism or feminism as neoliberal or antithetical to class politics … [and] fight tooth and nail to refute both class-blind neoliberal ‘antiracism’ as well as color-blind class reductionism wherever it appears.”⁸
— Tyler Zimmer, “Trump Is Not Going Away”
Class-Conscious Antiracism and Race-Conscious Anticapitalism
I agree that poor and working White people need to come to identify with poor and working people of color on the basis of their common exploitation by capital. As Rhyd Wildermuth writes:
“White people who identify more with their whiteness over their material conditions protect the capitalists (most of whom share the same color of skin as them). Identifying instead with their material conditions and their history of displacement would show them they have much more in common with poor Black people than they ever will with the rich.”
— Rhyd Wildermuth, “Fascism and the Deadlock of Race”
But I disagree that this means we should gloss over race in a rush to a class-focused analysis. Instead we need to center race, highlight it and boldface it. By subordinating race to class, class-centered Leftists risk a class reductionism which reproduces the conditions of White supremacy. We simply can’t “de-racialize” society without first making it very race-conscious.
It’s true that White people need to unlearn their Whiteness. But you can’t unlearn something without first seeing it. And we are just now starting to see it. It’s awkward and uncomfortable. But there’s no shortcut. There’s no comfortable way to go around or over or under racism to get to capitalism. The only way is through.
The defeat of Trump is a vindication of anti-racism (albeit a qualified one), but Biden’s victory holds the danger of a return to complacency. There is a danger that many Whites, after just having woke up to the role of race in America, will go back to sleep. Trump will leave office (one way or another), but the racist forces that put him there in the first place are very much alive—and they will be seeking vengeance. It is more important than ever to keep race front and center—as well as class, gender, and sexual orientation. That’s what being intersectional means. We have to hold it all in view at once. It’s not easy, but anything else is reductionist. As Ronald Cox writes,
“we need a Marxist analysis that is complex enough to understand that capitalist systems embody the intersection of class exploitation with racial, ethnic and gender oppressions that are not simply bourgeois impediments to universal working class solidarity.”
— Ronald Cox, “A Left Critique of Class Reductionism”
Class reductionism arises out of a legitimate critique of neoliberal identity politics and race reductionism, but it goes too far when it claims that race is not “real” or that racism can be overcome through “class-wide” (i.e., race-neutral) demands. Anti-capitalism isn’t really anti-capitalist unless it recognizes that capital exploits workers differently and that people of color are not only exploited, they are oppressed. Socialist icon Eugene Debs once said, “The class struggle is colorless.” I would counter that the real class struggle must be color-full.
Footnotes
¹ I have chosen to capitalize both White and Black herein for reasons similar to those made in this essay about the importance of centering race. While there are good arguments for capitalizing Black but not White, I agree with Black scholar Eve Ewing: “When we ignore the specificity and significance of Whiteness … we contribute to its seeming neutrality and thereby grant it power to maintain its invisibility.”
² Some of these voices come from outside the United States. It’s important to recognize that racism is not monolithic. Racism in the United States is unique because of the country’s history of chattel slavery. Because of that history, race tends to trump class in driving Americans’ behavior, including voting. Because I have lived all but two years of my life in America, my analysis is limited to American racism and American politics.
³ The quote comes from Adolph Reed’s interview on the July 3, 2020 episode of Rolling Stone’s “Useful Idiots” podcast.
⁴ Of course, there is another population of White people who are “identifying with their Whiteness” in a different way, one which is truly racist. But it is a mistake to conflate these two ways of identifying with race. One sees Whiteness as divine blessing and the other sees it as a curse on the world—and this makes all the difference. While the former leads to fascism, as Rhyd Wildermuth has observed, the latter has “created a racial consciousness which is currently leading to a crucial and important uprising against the police state in the United States.” It is important to note that it was a race-conscious uprising of both people of color and Whites.
⁵ Ironically, the fact that Adolph Reed is Black probably helps ease the conscience of many of those White Leftists who are eager to focus on class.
⁶ This does not mean reducing people to their race. Seeing a White person as White does not mean seeing them only as White. And the same is true for people of color.
⁷ Trump, of course, also ran (and won) on his own form of identity politics.
⁸ To be clear, I do not condone the cancelling of Adolph Reed, or anyone else who endorses his views. As Cornel West observed in response to the cancelling, “If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.” And I’m grateful that Gods & Radicals Press has been a space where we can have these important discussions.
*”If a socialist revolution is to happen, the working class must unite. If the class is to unite, revolutionaries must challenge the material and cultural basis of its disunity. So, every political project the Left undertakes needs to specifically challenge privilege within the working class, not sweep it under the rug to avoid ‘divisiveness.’ If your organizing doesn't meet that standard, you're not building class unity. You're tearing it down. There is no raceless and genderless class politics because there is no raceless and genderless class. So, trying to compartmentalize anti-privilege and anti-capitalist work is implicitly chauvinistic (except when it's explicitly so!). The Left must reject all politics that doesn't break down intra-class privilege, even when it comes from ‘our side.’" — Sophia Burns, “Class and Identity: Against Both/And”
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, PrayWithYourFeet.org, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.